Small Dogs Barking [#32]

I used to love coming across my dad’s writings — musings on yellow legal pads, notes in the margins of paperback books, poems typed out on that old printer paper with the hole-y edges you had to painstakingly tear away before the page was presentable.

On one such ’80s relic lives one of my favorite little stanzas:

INFINITY IS SMALL DOGS BARKING
ALL OVER THE WORLD

I never took the time to workshop these words with their author when I had the chance —

teenagering was a pretty all-consuming affair for me in the early-'90s  

— so I won’t ever know just how eloquent (or elemental) my dad’s explanation might’ve been. But, over the years decades, those nine words have simmered about in my head in what perhaps is the world’s longest slow-cooked word-soup.

Finally though, after all this time in the crockpot, I think those two lines from my dad’s 1985 brain typed out on his 1985 printer paper are finally ready to be served.

Before we met Ruby Vi, infinity was an epiphany I impatiently waited for, an adventure I dreamed about. (I mean, it’s a word so big it literally has its own symbol.)

Where was my dad when he decided he could define infinity? How did he know? When would I? (Why are the dogs small?)

Fifteen months ago, when we drove east from Park City with little more than a U-Haul trailer and a pocket full of wishes, I couldn’t have guessed just how intimately I’d soon begin to understand the illusive infinity.

But as it turns out, of late, I’ve spent an awful lot of time listening to small dogs barking.

I’m pretty sure I heard them last year in The Bahamas when crystal clear water and white sands stretched as far as we could see.

Then, I think they were barking again last weekend when it rained for 24 hours straight and we binge-watched Netflix until the WiFi died.

Those same dogs piped up two weeks ago when I watched Wyatt and Hudson surf for the first time, and they were howling again last week when, through murky green water, the wreck we’d set out to dive as a family seemed to rise up out of the muddy seabed like some subpar replica of the Black Pearl.

Lately, walking the barren streets of Bocas week after week — past the same shuttered “non-essential” store fronts and restaurants, into the same small grocery stores, down the same aisles, in search of the same list of provisions we bought the week before (which are the same as the ones we’ll buy again next week), I hear those little dogs.

They barked their way through the haze of our onboard quarantine that rendered hours of the day and days of the week irrelevant; and their yippity yap chorus continues to back our 64-month-long-and-counting happy hour.

This weekend, Bocas Del Toro returned to full lockdown, which essentially means the answer to any question that begins with:

Is it OK if I...?

is:

No -- it absolutely is not.

There are also rumors running amok that soon our fine province will reinstate the lockdown procedures of COVID-yore, whereby each individual (based first on gender — and don’t think for a moment that Panama includes any letter choices beyond M or F — and based second on passport number) will be allowed “out” for two hours on each of three designated days each week.

In case you’re already gnawing through this brief exercise in mental math and the result is seeming too ridiculous to be true, I’ll go ahead and confirm it for you — if the lockdown goes old school, people will be allowed out of their dwelling for six hours per week.

Six hours. Per week.

The cacophony of loud little Lassies is already deafening.

Since Boat Life began, we’ve seen infinity look like Sandy Cay — like a patch of Earth so glorious it takes your breath away.

Other times, it looks like a game of Risk — like the strategic monotony of marching your miniature blue plastic army across Yakutsk for the seventh time in as many hours. (Amen for the friend who shows up with Panamanian pork rinds. And beer.)

Sometimes, infinity feels like homemade ice cream tastes — like that endless summer vacation before 5th grade or air-conditioning-when-you’re-at-a-marina.

Or laughing with friends till your happy heart explodes and your face breaks a little.

Other times, infinity feels like misery — like 10,000 mistakes or one too many bad choices.

Or the kind of debilitating loss that crushes your soul.

Aboard Ruby Vi, infinity is the smell of freshly ground French press at dawn or a backed up head at midnight; it’s the smell of an oddly squatty (though delicious) loaf of cinnamon bread on a slow Sunday morning or a shocking flashback to the stench of that crowded overnight flight to Dubai in 2018.

That’s the thing I think my dad figured out about infinity.

Of course he knew that it’s sometimes larger than life — those moments too big to hold on to, that raucous too loud to ignore.

But he also noticed what I hadn’t — that infinity can be tiny and quiet; collections of odds and ends, of the itty bittiest bits and pieces that fill in the mosaic of our lives, right up to the frame.

Photos that don’t make the Instagram cut; scenes that never make it to the round table read-through, or even past the first story board:

Sometimes, infinity is the sitcom re-run we fall asleep to or the songs we delete from our playlists. Those otherwise-nondescript fragments that eventually become just a little too familiar — as soothing one day as they are intolerably annoying the next.

Maybe small dogs barking...

At some point over the past year-and-a-smidge, this catamaran-home we call Ruby Vi — this easy beast we’ve asked to sail us around the globe for a few years — started boat-schooling this once-upon-a-time teacher.

Some course offerings have been more palatable than others — Dolphins off the Bow was certainly more enjoyable than When a Sail Breaks in a Squall at 4:00AM. But I think 1985 Poetry will stand out as a favorite among favorites.

Nothing could ever drown out the cassette recordings of Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man album from my head-gear-all-day memories of early childhood.

And Liz Phair and Courtney Love will always hold a special place on my flannel-lined high school soundtrack.

But mile by nautical mile, I’m learning to pay a bit more homage to the background noise, to the songs I haven’t chosen — to that concert of yips and yaps from an imaginary choir of handbag-sized dogs that echoes around me.

Infinity is surely a shapeshifter — it can look and feel and taste and smell like anything to anyone at anytime.

But these days, for the life of me, I just can’t imagine how it could ever sound like anything other small dogs barking all over the world.

AFTERWORD:

This post was live for all of an hour before my mom texted to "remind" me that the notion of infinity as "small dogs barking all over the world" actually started when my dad asked my then-4-year-old cousin, Mindy, if she knew what infinity meant. Turns out, one of my favorite lines of poetry was born of Mindy's reply.

Apparently, this is a story I've been told many times, though I literally have no recollection of it. (Eyeroll emojis across the page...)

As it tends to be once in a while, my no-research policy is a bit of a thorn in my side on this one. But, as I replied to my mother, when it comes to narratives about my dad, whenever faced with a discrepancy in the storyline, I'll choose the version I've written for myself, slowly and deliberately over the years, above the one that actually happened. 

Every time. ❤️